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In that drawn-out White House battle in 2000, married women chose the Republican, George W. Bush — but single women, while less likely to vote, broke for Democrat Al Gore, who earned more than 60 percent of their vote. The “marriage gap” — the difference in the party preferences of married and unmarried women — so fascinated Gardner that she made it her mission to understand and explain it, ultimately setting up two nonpartisan organizations devoted primarily to that subject.

As Democrats wade into midterms with an unpopular president, persisting economic anxieties and historical trends stacked squarely against them, they are bracing for turnout trouble. But they hope to take advantage of the marriage gap by ramping up turnout among progressive-leaning single women, a group they see as a potential silver bullet in key races across the country.

So Gardner, who is widely considered the top expert on the marriage gap, has become something of an oracle for the Democrats’ 2014 strategy.

Her central advice to candidates trying to appeal to single women this cycle? Show some empathy. Through press calls, Capitol Hill briefings, think tank events and other forums, Gardner is stressing the need for such “in your shoes” narratives. To get single women to vote, she says, candidates must signal that they understand — and care about — the economic challenges facing such voters, while also backing policies to ease their burdens.

Democrats have embraced that argument, touting their support for everything from raising the minimum wage to equal pay for women in races nationwide.

“She has really led the charge on helping to understand how to target women voters and how to turn them out,” said Kelly Ward, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “She’s a champion and leader for all of us in terms of how we can do that better.”

For her part, Gardner is relishing the moment.

“I’m interested in growing the pool of people who participate in electing their officials,” said Gardner, a former Democratic operative whose first race was the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid. “Are these women … being represented by their elected officials adequately in terms of the issues they care about? In terms of their lives?”

Gardner, long both a participant in and a student of politics, saw suggestions of the marriage gap in the 1990s. But the 2000 results prompted Gardner to seriously examine whether the pattern was more than a fluke.

By 2003, “after re-reading the exits and looking at some independent research and other memos related to the 2000 election,” Gardner was convinced marital status played a major role in who voted, and how. So she and her friend Chris Desser, a lawyer and activist, in 2003 launched a group called Women’s Voices Women Vote, which sought to better understand unmarried women and get them to the polls, at a time when conventional wisdom focused on the difference in voting patterns between men and women.

Gardner’s “the visionary, the persistent driver, the person who understood how to take this phenomenon into practical politics,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who herself has studied the marriage gap and consulted with Gardner. “She’s the person who kept sounding the horn into the wilderness until people finally listened.”

Gardner’s outfits are hardly the only ones to address women voters. And a handful of her groups’ initiatives have facedcontroversy before. Some Republicans have also scoffed at the nonpartisan label of Gardner’s organizations.